Sociology Of Deviant Behavior

These may be acts of deviance but unfortunately e did not talk about setting your own apartment on fire in our class discussion so the three acts of deviance I chose are drugs, alcohol, and suicide. There are two main theories of deviance and they are the Positivist and the Constructionist. The positivist theory “holds deviance to be absolutely and intrinsically real” (Thai, 4). The positivist theory I feel best describes the deviance in Fight Club is the Anomie Strain Theory. This theory is best explained as a feeling a helplessness in your current life role that results in deviance.

Narrator has a decent job and an apartment and seems to be able o afford all his wants and needs but, he’s trapped in this constant cycle of consumerism and he wants to escape but does not have the means to. Narrator uses Marten’s rebellion mode of adoption. This is when one reject society goals and means and then goes one step further and tries to replace them (Thai, 19). The narrator embodies this by rejecting consumerism and creating fight club which eventually turns into “project mayhem”. He states to the police that the reason for targeting the credit card companies in project mayhem is to erase everybody’s debt to create utter chaos.

He wants to rate a clean slate and essentially free everyone trapped the way he believes he once was. Mentioned that he did not have the means to escape his consumerism cycle, this is where Tyler Turned comes into play. He is the replacement of means in this rebellion mode of adaptation. The constructionist theory believes that deviance is a label and that we choose to voluntarily act deviant. The constructionist theory best that suits the deviance in Fight Club is the social conflict theory. The Social Conflict Theory “has to do with the incompatible interests, needs, and desires of such verse groups… (Thai, 43). The incompatible groups in this instance would be the capitalist society versus project mayhem. At first fight club was just about a bunch of guys coming together to fight each other. It was then turned into a movement to become free of the burden of things, belongings, and money. The members of fight club do not want material possessions but the capitalists want you to want them and therein lies the conflict. Therefore the only “logical” way to resolve this conflict is to eliminate the credit card companies. The first example of deviance is drug use.

We see it throughout the entire film. The caffeine in the narrators’ coffee, the tobacco in the cigarettes, and the bottle of Asana that Marl polished off. The economic deprivation theory explains drug use as an escape from your poverty. The narrator does not start smoking until after he moves into the dirty abandoned house. This is a perfect example of how being in poverty can lead to stress. And an easy and sometimes relatively cheap way to relieve stress is by using drugs. Of course smoking cigarettes has its consequences but a more serious example of drug SE is when Marl takes the Asana.

She lives in squander. She goes to support groups for the free food, steals clothes from laundry mats to sell for money, and steals food from meals on wheels to provide her next meal for herself. She also chain smoke cigarettes which I can only imagine relaxes her in some way. There is one scene in which she calls the narrator and explains to him that she swallowed an entire bottle of Asana. She had no real reasoning to do this but I can only assume that it was a way to escape her Shiite life for if not ever, then just for a little bit.

Drug use and abuse is more closely related to being of a lower socioeconomic class. Marl is fits this theory better than the narrator but I think it was important to point out that he did not start smoking cigarettes until he lost all his worldly possessions and began squatting in an abandoned house. Alcohol use was also prevalent in the film. We see drinking associated with the fight club. They all meet at a bar before the big fights. Maybe the alcohol acts as a social lubricant and may even give these big manly men more confidence.

This explains the preschool stage of becoming an alcoholic. The main reason people even found out about fight club was because they were at this bar where it all started. Then more fight clubs started popping up in big cities at, you guessed it, bars. The first time we see alcohol used to release tension is in Loll’s Tavern after the narrators condo is blown up. He needed the alcohol to open up to Tyler Turned and relax after he just got this terrible news. All the males in this film are in this preschool stage. They are all at the same bar doing the same; socializing and releasing tension.

The other mime we see the narrator and the members of fight club drinking is when they are watching the news at the house on Paper Street. They are passing around 6-packs of beer and getting excited to see whatever is about to be on the television. They are using the alcohol again as a way to unwind and to celebrate the start of project mayhem. What we know from our class notes most alcohol users are white males, which is a fair portrayal in this movie. All the characters, with the exception of a few, are fairly young white men. Alcohol can also have some negative consequences.

For example instigating or starting a fight with a person who has been drinking can blow up pretty fast. An example of this in the film is when the narrator is jealous of the “too blonde” boys relationship with Tyler Turned. The bar is closed and fight club is open. This leads me to believe that once again there was some social drinking. The narrator already had these feelings of animosity towards “too blonde” and in combination with the supposed alcohol consumption, he lets loose on the poor guys face. An individual does not need to have a problem with alcohol for it to be deviant.

Many other factors play into why it can be considered deviant. The final example of deviance in this film is suicide. There are two examples of suicide in this film. The first is when Marl consumers an entire bottle of her Asana and the second is when the narrator shoots himself. Marl attempted to kill herself. She even states to Tyler Turned that “this isn’t a for real suicide thing, this is probably one of those cry for help things”. She also used the method that most women use to commit suicide, overdosing. She did not really want to die, she was wanted someone to pay attention to her ND help her.

The second act of suicide is when the narrator discovers that he is Tyler Turned and that his idea of Tyler Turned is all in his head. He wants all this madness in his head to go away and he thinks the only way to accomplish this is by killing himself. For a few moments after the gunshot goes off believed he really had killed himself to escape from his mental illness. But as came to find out he shot himself in the neck as an extreme scare tactic to get rid of his imagined Tyler Turned. This trick worked and his “suicide” could be seen as a threat and an attempt.

He also fell into the most common way males commit suicide, firearms. He used threat to meet the goal of trying to scare the Brad Pit Tyler Turned and attempted by actually shooting himself. He was not successful in ending his own life, however he was successful in ending the imagined Tyler Tureen’s life. Believe the reason for the narrators threatened/ attempted suicide was too much social integration. This type of suicide is also none as altruistic suicide. He was way too heavily involved in his fight club and his imaginary friendship with Tyler Turned. He was too involved in fight club and project mayhem.

The only way he felt he could release himself of the identity of Tyler Turned was by a fake All in all I found this film extremely confusing and hard to follow. After watching it for a second time however and a few spoilers from my friends, I started catching on to what was happening. The first time I watched the movie was blind and could not see the examples of deviance that we had learned in class. I knew this movie Was deviant because smashing cars bumpers and secretly putting porn into children’s movies, is not in the normal elm of what is considered socially acceptable. Ceded to watch it outside of class for my first time so that could gain general knowledge about the film and focus all my attention on purely watching it for entertainment purposes. Then watching it for the second time in class I was able to focus more on the examples of deviance as saw them because I knew what was going to happen next. Then I saw the types of deviances was looking for. I was surprised how easy it was to pick out the types of deviance from class after watching it for a second time.